FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT CENTRAL GOVERNMENT - PAGE 4

Battling to save her administration, Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo cast herself as a radical constitutional reformer Monday and blamed her country's political system for endemic corruption that has stained her time in office. "Over the years, our political system has degenerated to the extent that it is difficult for anyone to make any headway, yet keep his hands clean," said Arroyo, 58, in her annual state of the nation address. Arroyo said she favors a constitutional makeover that would replace the U.S.-style political system with a parliamentary system.

* Cleric's first visit to Kurdish region * Sadr seeks to quell high tensions between Baghdad and Arbil * Calls for talks between all parties ARBIL, Iraq, April 26 (Reuters) - Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr visited the president of the autonomous northern Kurdistan region on Thursday seeking to ease tensions between Baghdad and the Kurds that have threatened the fragile coalition government. The central government and the Kurdish region have long-running disputes over political autonomy, oil rights and contested territories, and ties have been further strained by a recent clash over oil exports.

Thousands of Somalis on Friday marched to protest African Union plans to send peacekeepers to help ensure the safe return of a new government now based in neighboring Kenya. About 25,000 people demonstrated in the capital after Friday prayers, spurred on by Islamic clerics who are unhappy with plans to deploy the foreign force to help restore order. Somalia has had no central government since 1991, when opposition leaders ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Anarchy followed in the nation of 7 million.

Soviet consumers were told Monday to prepare for sweeping price increases of no less than 60 percent under the Kremlin's latest plan to revive the critically troubled economy. The government of President Mikhail Gorbachev promised to provide compensation through wages and pensions for up to 85 percent of the higher prices, which are to affect everything but three Soviet necessities: medicine, fuel and vodka. The plan, which has been submitted to the national Parliament, is an alternative to the rapid scrapping of economic Communism considered and rejected last year by Gorbachev.

For the second time in two weeks, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is sending newly trained Afghan troops from the capital to quell fighting in outlying regions, this time in northern Afghanistan, government officials said. Heavy fighting broke out Wednesday as an Uzbek warlord's militia advanced on Maymana, capital of northern Faryab province, forcing the local governor to appeal for support from the central government. The government ordered a battalion of 750 men to prepare to fly Thursday to Maymana, said Gen. Mir Jan, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry.

* Measure could shut out junior miners, drag out slump in ore exports * Checks on thousands of permits could be held up * Staffing shortage could also delay clearances By Fergus Jensen JAKARTA, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Indonesia's central government has fixed a December deadline to approve thousands of mining business permits, a tight timeframe that threatens to shut out many junior miners and extend a slump in exports of metal ore from Southeast Asia's largest economy.

Afghanistan plans to replace top customs and finance officials in all its provinces in the coming month as part of a plan to return badly needed customs revenue to the central government. Beginning as early as this weekend, Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani said, central government representatives will travel to customs houses around Afghanistan, trying to gauge how much revenue is coming into the country. The delegations will be the government's first step toward enforcing an agreement signed last week by a dozen regional leaders who pledged to turn over customs revenues to Kabul, stop fighting one another with private armies and relinquish multiple and unofficial titles.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Opposition politician Ricardo Hernandez was elected mayor of Tariba, a small Venezuelan city near the border with Colombia, by a landslide. But he didn't have long to bask in his victory. In the days after December 8 municipal elections in which the opposition won 75 mayoralties, Hernandez discovered that the company that collects trash had stopped working - apparently on orders of his predecessor, a member of the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV). And, the new mayor says, the state government of Tachira, which is controlled by the PSUV, ordered the police in Tariba to hand over its firearms and vehicles to a state force.

By Vincent J. Schodolski, Chicago Tribune. Tribune correspondent George de Lama, in Moscow, contributed to this report | September 12, 1990

As the Soviet central government dithered over its collapsing economy, the parliament of the USSR's vast Russian republic voted overwhelmingly Tuesday for a radical blueprint to replace central planning with a free-market system within 500 days. The effect was to render Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov's central government irrelevant in many ways and to set Russia-led by Boris Yeltsin, President Mikhail Gorbachev's chief rival-on the path toward capitalism. The central government's admission that it was unable to make a firm decision on how to stop the economy's downward spiral was greeted with angry cries from legislators and demands for Ryzhkov's resignation.

After a 24-hour game of budgetary brinkmanship that threatened the salaries of millions of state employees, Soviet and Russian officials reached a compromise Saturday that guaranteed the funding of the federal government through the end of the year. Under the terms of the accord worked out in an emergency bargaining session, Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia would fund the central government during December and ensure that people ranging from soldiers to garbage men are paid.